Training

Coe-style elite 800m, 1500m, and mile training from “Winning Running”

If you want to understand training for middle-distance running events—800m, 1500m, 1600m, mile—you need to understand Peter and Sebastian Coe’s approach.

In the English-speaking world, Coe-style training absolutely dominated discussions about training in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, mostly due to the fact that Sebastian Coe, under the guidance of his father Peter, was the king of the 800m, 1500m, and mile in the 1970s and 1980s.

The analogy to the Ingebrigtsen family is obvious: a father with a bold vision for training and a son with incredible talent and grit, who not only rose to the top of the sport athletically but changed the way legions of runners approach training for their event.

Both coaches borrowed heavily from a pioneering compatriot—Gjert Ingebrigtsen from Marius Bakken,[1] and Peter Coe from Frank Horwill. Like Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Kerr, Coe also had fierce rivals: fellow Brits Steve Ovett and Steve Cram, each of whom snatched medals from Coe in dramatic fashion.

That’s where the similarities stop, though—Sebastian and his father never had a falling out, and the structure of Coe-style training is almost diametrically opposite to that of Ingebrigtsen-style training.

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A guide to post-race workouts for runners

Track season is nearly upon us and that’s got me thinking about a very track-centric question: when, if ever, should you do a workout after doing a race?

This strategy—a post-race workout—When used correctly, post-race workouts can help maintain an adequate training load and balance out the distribution of speeds within your training schedule, even when you’re racing frequently or have scheduling obligations to compete early in the season, when you’d like to be getting in more general and supportive training.

So, let’s take a look at what post race workouts are, who should use them, and when.

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Two workouts that aren’t in Marathon Excellence

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I tested out the training plans for Marathon Excellence for Everyone with the help of a large group of “beta testers” from this very email list. Monitoring the training of these beta testers helped me fine-tune and improve the training plans in the book before it was released.

Today I want to showcase two workouts that I removed from the training plans after the beta testing rounds and explain why I cut them from the final schedules.

It’s not because they’re bad workouts—they’re great sessions! But I removed them because they were asking too much of the athlete early on in training. Not so much from a difficulty perspective, but in terms of psychological buy-in and in terms of precise pacing skills.

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A high-level picture of psychological training load for runners

This is the third article in my series on unpacking what runners mean when they talk about “training load.” The first two articles covered physiological training load and biomechanical training load. Today, we will turn our attention to the fascinating, subjective, and little-studied topic of psychological training load.

What is psychological training load? Put briefly, psychological training load describes the mental and emotional effects of training—both in terms of your short-term cognitive state and your longer-term psychological orientation.

Proper psychological training load drives motivation: both in the short-term sense of ability to summon a maximal effort and endure fatigue in a workout or race, and the long-term ability to believe in yourself, believe in your training, and believe in what you can achieve.

This discussion is going to be much more philosophical than the previous two articles. We’ll cover the quantitative side first, but I’m much more interested in broader and more expansive views on athlete psychology than you typically see discussed in the scientific literature.

Tellingly, when you hear great coaches discuss their training approach, they often put quite a lot of emphasis on the psychological side of things.[1] My own experience is similar: much of the work I do as a coach is managing athlete psychology and mindset—figuring out how to do the workouts, as well as what workouts to do.

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A high-level picture of biomechanical training load for runners

What do we mean when we say “training load”? This is the second article in a three-part series aimed at answering that question.

My core argument in this series is that there are three distinct types of training load you should consider—physiological training load, biomechanical training load, and psychological training load.

Today, we turn our attention to the second of these types of load. What exactly is biomechanical training load? In short:

Biomechanical training load describes the mechanical force—and ultimately, the mechanical damage—experienced by the load-bearing tissues of your body: bones, tendons, muscles, ligaments, and joint surfaces.

When talking about biomechanical training load, what we mean is “how much physical damage are you doing to your body.”

Proper biomechanical training load drives health and structural integrity: the ability to avoid injury and increase your body’s ability to sustain higher levels of training in the future.

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A high-level picture of physiological training load for runners

Runners and coaches throw around the term “training load” a lot, assuming everyone knows what they’re talking about. But when you start to dig into the meaning of that term, you end up with what you might call the “tempo run” problem—the term means something different for just about everyone!

In this article, I am beginning a three-part series on how to think about training load. I’m not going to laboriously cover the mathematics of every possible training load metric.

Instead, I want to present a high-level conceptual framework—specifically, my claim is that there are three types of training load that you should consider in training: physiological training load, biomechanical training load, and psychological training load.

Each of these types of training load has various ways of being quantified, and arguably various sub-components as well. The three types of training load also relate to one another in some interesting ways. But before talking about interactions, we need to understand each type of load on its own first.

Our topic today is the first of these three: physiological training load.

In short, physiological training load describes the stimulus experienced by the various biological subsystems of your body that contribute to energetics writ large: so, your bloodstream, your mitochondria, your lactate transport proteins, and even the primary motor cortex of your brain. Proper physiological training load drives improvement: gains in your body’s energetic capabilities that allow you to run faster and further.

See also: Part II - biomechanical training load

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Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy for distance runners, 50 years on

Fifty years ago, on August 14, 1975, the great Australian coach Percy Cerutty passed away in Portsea, Australia—the same sandy, windswept coastal town where he trained some of Australia’s top middle distance runners in the 1950s and 1960s.

Cerutty was best-known for the accomplishments of his coaching charges John Landy and Herb Elliott—Landy being the second person to break four minutes in the mile and a bronze medalist at 1500m at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and Herb Elliott being the greatest miler of his day, who at age 22 was Olympic champion, Commonwealth champion, and world-record holder in the mile (3:54.5) and 1500m (3:35.6).

Cerutty also had a longstanding coaching rivalry with New Zealander Arthur Lydiard, whose name would become synonymous with high-mileage training during the 1960s.

Perhaps because Cerutty intentionally eschewed narrowly “systematic” approaches to training, there’s very little discussion of “Cerutty-style” training the way you hear runners discussing “Lydiard-style” training. Cerutty left behind no pre-written workout template, no system of formulas, and little in the way of universal dictums for training.[1] He did, however, leave behind quite a lot of writing.

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Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen’s Norwegian Single Threshold training approach

Perhaps the most unlikely sporting hero to come from Norway’s famous Ingebrigtsen family is Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen.

Though he has no Olympic medals, European titles, or world records like his brothers Jakob, Filip, and Henrik, the eldest Ingebrigtsen brother has accomplished a much more relatable goal for many recreational and amateur runners: losing 25 kg, getting back in shape in his mid-30s, and running very respectable times (32:58 in the 10k and 1:12:11 for the half marathon) while training once per day as a family man with a full-time job.

Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen’s training, set by his brother Henrik, has served as a source of inspiration for a burgeoning Norwegian Singles Approach to training, which attempts to apply the principles of the Norwegian model of training (pioneered by Marius Bakken and later advanced by the speedier Ingebrigtsen brothers) to self-described “hobby joggers”: ordinary people with ordinary jobs, who still have ambitions of improving their times.

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Sub-70 half marathon training using a percentage-based approach

One big advance for me as a coach in the last few years has been the “feel” that I have for half marathon training. I’m now at a point where I have a good sense of how to design a training program to produce reliable results in the half marathon for a wide range of different kinds of athletes: men, women, elite, subelite, amateur, etc. 

There is, of course, not one singular HM training plan that’s perfect for everyone, but there are principles of half marathon training that work across different athletes.

The half marathon is an odd distance because very few books or training programs explicitly focus on it as a “first class” racing distance—usually, the advice you get is to do a generic 10k plan but with more endurance, or a generic marathon plan but with more speed.

My goal here is to show how Canova-style “full-spectrum” percentage-based training can be applied to building training plans targeting the half marathon, using worked examples from four different athletes I have coached who were all aiming for the same goal: a sub-70 (i.e. sub-1:10) half marathon. 

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Individual variation in aerobic and anaerobic energy contributions to different events

Fast-twitch Frannie and Slow-twitch Sallie face off in an ultimate battle to discover who is truly the queen of the mile

Many books on training and exercise physiology (including mine) begin with a discussion of aerobic and anaerobic energy production. The next logical question to ask is how much these two energy systems contribute to the various running events—how “aerobic” is, say, the 800m? Such a question is sure to spark heated debate online, but I have always been skeptical of such figures, for two reasons.

First, some of the methods that were traditionally used to come up with the aerobic vs. anaerobic contribution to a particular event have not held up to scrutiny.

Take the concept of “oxygen debt”—the idea that you could measure anaerobic energy expenditure by measuring post-exercise oxygen consumption, as your body “paid” for its anaerobic energy production. This concept was known to be shaky as early as 1984, and though later research has improved on the accuracy of these metrics considerably, many of the papers that coaches and training books cite do not use these modern, improved methods.

Second, I have a broader disagreement with the search for one number: to say, for example that the 800m is “65% aerobic” (as Joe Vigil’s book does) or ~50% (as Coe/Martin’s book does) glosses over the fact that there is tremendous individual variation in how much aerobic versus anaerobic energy goes into a given event.[1]

In fact, that range of variation looks like this:

Event % Anaerobic (range for nine out of ten runners)
800m 15–33%
1000m 10–25%
1500m / mile 8–20%
3000m / 2 miles 4–10%
5000m 3–6%
10,000m 2–4%

Where do these numbers come from? Read on to find out!

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Check out my new book on marathon training!